Signposts, Benchmarks, and the Public Interest: Solving the Challenge of Keeping an Open Medium Open

Proponents

World Broadcasting Union (WBU)

Partners

Panos London, BBC,

European Broadcasting Union,

Women's Net ,

A2K Dynamic coalition

Additional Information

Signposts, Benchmarks, and the Public Interest; solving the challenge of keeping an open medium open.

A Best Practice Forum proposed by the World Broadcasting Union

In a complex open news and information society which Internet has the promise to create, there are inevitable risks of un-reliability and manipulation, and left to itself, the web may tend to uniformity and dominance by a few multinational companies. The Forum will explore the policy and actions of mainstream media providers to provide balance, encourage cultural pluralism, and to help users evaluate what they find on the web. Have they succeeded? What lessons have been learned? Has the Internet, in its turn, influenced mainstream media?

Part 1: The place of services from mainstream media providers and broadcasters on the Internet.Speaker to be announced reporting recent analysis.

Part 2: A case study of the tools of access for open broadband. What has been done, and what needs to be done?Speaker to be announced reporting recent results.

Part 3: Interactive Discussion. How can we create a "Fifth Estate 2.0" in the public interest in the Internet environment? At the national level, in some countries, the existing communications media have developed democratic values which have been built into traditional mainstream media. What lessons can learned from this for the Internet environment? . What issues that have been addressed by mainstream media that may be relevant for the internet? What will be the eventual effect on the Internet and media ecosystem?